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Nvidia Wants To Prohibit Consumer GPU Use In Datacenters (theregister.co.uk)
The Register reports:
Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers -- forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips. The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: "No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted."
Long-time Slashdot reader Xesdeeni has a few questions: Is this really even legal? First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively. Second, because how can a customer (at least in the U.S.) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?
Nvidia expects that "working together with our user base on a case-by-case basis, we will be able to resolve any customer concerns," they told CNBC, adding that "those who don't download new drivers won't be held to the new terms."
Long-time Slashdot reader Xesdeeni has a few questions: Is this really even legal? First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively. Second, because how can a customer (at least in the U.S.) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?
Nvidia expects that "working together with our user base on a case-by-case basis, we will be able to resolve any customer concerns," they told CNBC, adding that "those who don't download new drivers won't be held to the new terms."
With policies like that, Oracle will be proud to buy them!
...just because you plaster something in a license doesn't make it automatically law.
Just don't use the new driver if you have an existing deployment
Fuck you, Nvidia.
Some kind of bug that only affects 24/7 usage of the software or hardware (temperature reliability issues)?
This is a lawsuit waiting to happen! And yes, it might be violating City, State, and/or Federal laws here in the US, and foreign laws as well!
Don't see how it could possibly stand up in court!
BTW, IANAL!!!
If I can plug it in and make it work and accept the features and limitations of consumer gear itâ(TM)s not their damn business what I do with stuff I buy.
before it expires (or NVIDIA asks Google to clear it): here
I don't see NVIDIA going after people who install the software in a datacenter. I see them using this licensing clause to quash lawsuits from people who do violate the terms, and end up having some sort of issue running the hardware where NVIDIA could be held liable. Be it something extreme like a fire from overheating, to a chip-level problem like what Intel has recently been going through You're running this software/hardware in a datacenter, and we told you not to. Liability absolved...maybe.
History repeats itself, did you ever remember the stories about Microsoft and Xbox? Apple and the iPhone? The right to modify your own hardware device?
The consumers and the companies that produced these product - couldn't quite agree on the ownership, even though it should be blatantly clear: If you OWN the hardware you purchase, you're technically free to do what it as you wish (in a perfect world free from lobbyist that convince lawmakers to follow the way of the companies rather than the public wishes).
Now, that said - the companies in turn, has no specific responsibility to offer you free software that support certain functions for your own purposes if they don't wish to do so, you may own the hardware, but you don't have rights to demand them to do anything for you in the future with your hardware (unless promised by them).
Nor do they have any obligation to provide you or anyone with full documentation on how your hardware works.
You in turn - have the full rights to refuse their products, you simply don't buy them.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I may be overly optimistic but I hope that this move will provide enough incentive for big corporations to get behind open source drivers and help create something that's on par with the official ones.
FTFY
If the topic comes up, I'll just mention that I keep all of my rack mounted "systems" (not gonna call them servers) in a 5000 square foot "storage closet" that just happens to have redundant UPS and cooling systems in it. How fortunate for me!
This seems like a pretty easy legal loophole to get around. If that doesn't work, I can say that I just used them for crypto mining since they already have a loophole for that.
Can a company be more retarded? Well it's hard.
This would never be allowed on other products. 2 examples.
At brunch the other day I ordered hot chocolate. They served it in a coffee cup. Imagine if the cup maker sued insisting they buy his hot cocoa mugs?
My sister needed some tools for her garden At her new home, she folded down the seats of her hatchback to fit the rakes and shovels in the car. What if GM had stopped that because she wasnâ(TM)t using a pickup?
Both of these examples are absurd but no more absurd than nvidia restricting cards like this.
Shitty company can go to hell.
Some lawyer at Nvidia has never heard of the first sale doctrine.
Gun makers also don't want people to use their product to murder people, but it happens anyway.
Now, everyone is trying to cash-in on the walled garden concept to generate healthy profits. A huge advance over the Economics concept called "rent-seeking."
If I understand it right, you can still do whatever you want with the hardware itself, the restriction is on the drivers (software). That is why it does not apply to those who do not update the drivers. Nor if you use GeForce GPUs on Linux with the Nouveau drivers, but in practice switching to AMD is probably a better alternative.
The world doesn't work that way. Companies don't and shouldn't have dictatorial powers over things they have sold.
Doesn't stop them from trying though.
And then all the operators of big datacenters invest heavily in moving to AMD consumer GPUs (because they all have an incentive to spend less). If you're going to abuse your customers, at least become a monopoly before doing it.
This LICENSE will automatically terminate if Customer fails to comply with any of the terms and conditions hereof. In such event, Customer must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE and all of its component parts.
No Warranties.To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the software is provided "As is" and nvidia and its suppliers disclaim all warranties of any kind or nature, whether express, implied, or statutory, relating to or arising from the software, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.
Governing Law. This LICENSE shall be deemed to have been made in, and shall be construed pursuant to, the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to or application of its conflict of laws rules or principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is specifically disclaimed.
If I understand it right, you can still do whatever you want with the hardware itself, the restriction is on the drivers (software). That is why it does not apply to those who do not update the drivers.
I'm afraid it's not quite that simple. Ever heard of "rooting"? It simply means bypassing and editing the BIOS (which technically is also software) to your own liking, this often means bypassing access to hardware. This was the case for the longest time for those who wanted to use the powerful multi-core processors of the old Playstation 3.
These companies, don't want you to use your hardware for other purposes than they intended - as long as it competes with their own alternate products, never-mind the competition...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
In a data center why would you need a dedicated graphic chip?
Enforcement of this will be pretty much impossible without some tie-in to the OS or drivers. First of all, what's a datacenter? Cloud-based infrastructure, or a room of servers only running internally on a local network? How about a mining operation in someone's basement? A grad student running a small network of GPUs for some sort of academic research? Etc. Now, if they really want to enforce it, it can be done -- you'd have to tie the software and drivers to server-class platforms that people typically have to pay for. E.g., I've seen Chelsio do that with some of their iWarp NICs where iWarp is disabled on anything but Windows 10 Enterprise and the Microsoft server OSes (though in that case, Chelsio claimed that Microsoft forced them to do it). On the Linux side, that might not be a realistic option.
Of course, the EU cannot control the price - public lynchings may be required for that.
Are rednecks interested in Nvidia products? Enquiring minds need to know!
Unless an organization is already heavily invested in CUDA, they might go with OpenCL instead so they can use AMD consumer stuff instead of Quadros. Even where GeForce versus AMD Vega currently favors GeForce, Quadro prices will make sure that GeForce versus Vega turns that into a win for AMD in terms of investment costs.
In academia, that would also lead to the effect that new developers are more often trained on OpenCL and less on CUDA. That could lead to the sort of long-term win Microsoft Visual Studio had over the Borland development tools.
C - the footgun of programming languages
My money, my purchasing decisions.
ATI / AMD wins again!!
As they are open sourcing the ati video drivers in full for Linux.
workstation users likely are on the full drivers and not the more basic WHQL ones.
Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and Nvidia executives are trying to see who can be most abusive?
Just two laws are needed:
1) Everything bad is forbidden.
2) Everything good is mandatory.
Prediction: Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and Nvidia will combine and become one company, known as MOAN.
We'll all be moaning about MOAN.
The license you agreed to when you purchased the hardware and licensed software still applies for that version of the software. Nvidia has said this publicly in no uncertain terms.
If you want something new from them then you need to agree to their new rules. I cannot see anything at all morally or legally disputable here.
What a rediculious hissy fit from the poster.
We call it an IT equipment room. Problem solved. Those GeForce cards arenâ(TM)t in a data center. They are in our âoeit equipment room âoe
Very strange move given the situation. Insanity of the supplier is a good reason to look for another one. AMD RX Vega is equal in price/performance of "consumer" hardware at moment. For CG at least.
I don't think this is relevant to GP's argumentation. He (she?) wrote that those who do not update the drivers don't need to agree to the new license. No rooting is necessary here. Legally, it means that the desire of Nvidia to control the use of their hardware can be avoided. At least in the short term.
Practically, the problem will resurface when the current hardware is obsolete/gets unreliable because of age and needs replacing, including drivers for the new hardware. Then the license terms won't be so easily avoided anymore.
Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore. I mean the open source driver development that gradually replaces the closed source drivers at AMD. Those licenses not be revoked for already released versions.
C - the footgun of programming languages
How is data center defined? I dont have a data center, I have a lab! I dont have a data center, I have a computer room. I dont have a data center I have a mind your own dam business room. Even if in a license I find it hard to see where they can stop the use of a product that has been purchased.
Rednecks around here buy $3,000 gaming rigs, and literally throw them away when they get a virus.
In cluster environments, the NVidia products are well ahead of anything made by AMD. And a good portion of the other core components (management, scheduler, ...) are already built to support NVidia hardware (with NVML/SMI/...).
Some of the Intel accelerators might get close but are also pretty pricey.
If the CEO was tortured for a few years, companies might take the hint and not act like human shit piles.
Workstation users aren't in data centers.
I recently tried to add an nvidia card to my workstation for a virtual machine, and it turned out that nvidia breaks the driver when they detect the card is in a virtual machine.
Specifically you get an unexplained "Code 43" error, and nvidia's excuse is that there is a bug which they will not fix. However if you spent some time to hide the VM, like removing hypervisor drivers, it would have magically worked. Unlucky as I am, it turns out nvidia also broke that workaround (at least it did not work for me).
There are 3rd party patchers for this thing: https://github.com/sk1080/nvid... which require a lot of involvement, and will probably break at the next update. Given so much effort by nvidia to make sure I would be unable to use the hardware I purchased, I gave up, and removed the nvidia card from the workstation.
If I purchase a piece of hardware, I plan to use it for anything I damned well please, as long as it is not in violation of any laws. And, NVIDIA telling me that I can't use part of the hardware in my data center is not a law. It's like a car manufacturer telling a small business that it can't use a small SUV to make deliveries, and that it has to purchase a more expensive delivery truck for that work. It's nonsense.
Not legal in the least as it is a change in the original purchase agreement between the consumer and corporate entity. This is not acceptable after the negotiated purchase. I feel this is an indication that at this level of hardware/software API it is not acceptable to have closed source drivers and open sourced software development is the only format the will scale and gave the end user flexibility required in future highly dynamic use systems. Proprietary software driver and API development is not a future driven structure. Corporate proprietary function will be on the CTE convolutional side with open source agnostic interfacing. This is not a debate at this point for longterm immortal entity function
How do they intend to enforce this? Get your IP address from the driver, match it up against known blocks assigned to hosting companies? It's not like they can say "Oh, this is a Dell R740, the driver won't install" because that thing could be sitting (loudly) on a table in my house, not necessarily racked in a data center. It's one thing to say "We want you to buy our Quadro/Tesla gear for your giant virtualized environment" but another to say I can't pop a 1080 Ti in the one server that needs GPU horsepower for some task. It's asinine.
Apple has never tried legal restrictions on where hardware could be used. To this day, data centers will have racks of Mac minis, if they have clients who need them.
Seriously, don't put up with this shit!
This may have to do with error correction. Gaming GPU's allow for looser faults and glitches in render results. Professional GPU's sacrifice frames per second to error correction of the render. This policy may reflect Nvidia's concerns over how this "performance enhancement" may introduce logic discrepancies in world automated through such technologies.
... a competitor with better terms of use.
The market needs to spank Nvidia.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... sign to "Game Room."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Contract law. Private agreements done under contract law are government enforced and regulated; it allows capitalism to be possible.
I doubt NVIDIA is doing this solely for profit and is not planning to enforce this because it is not worth their effort. Will they take some advantage of it? sure, but specialized non-consumer hardware will cost difference prices; likely higher even with a lower profit margin.
This is LIABILITY insurance and was going to happen but I think they rushed it out now because of Intel. Gaming GPUs are not made for security or high load stability. Cloud services are a new market with different needs and more likely for costly lawsuits (MBA really stands for Move Blame Away. Externalize costs and liabilities as much as possible-- make all fuck ups be somebody else's problem and protect your own ass for bad decisions by suing. Also, the process eliminates jobs. MBAs are job killers, not creators.)
captcha: demise
Some kind of bug that only affects 24/7 usage of the software or hardware (temperature reliability issues)?
It might involve the pricing and shortages of NVIDIA GPUs in the consumer market? Locally GTX 1060 and above are out of stock, 1050s are heading that way.
You don't get to sell me a product, then dictate how I will use it unless there is a safety issue, then maybe.
You can't sell me a TV then tell me it can only be used in the living room.
You can't sell me a bicycle, then tell me I can only ride it on Wednesdays.
You don't want folks buying the cheaper hardware ? Make your professional grade stuff woth upgrading to instead of reusing the same hardware and ' unlocking ' it with software.
The world is fully aware of Nvidias bullshit which is why they go with the non-pro gear. Why the hell would we spend 3x the price when all they do is change the drivers ?
Datacenter might include a cryptocurrency mining farm?
What are the odds that the warranty claims on these cards skyrocketed when they started getting used 24/7 in DC applications and caused this to get thrown in? They know miners won't buy cards that are inefficient for their purposes, and that money train is far too good to throw away, but wealthy corporations and universities? Pay up.
Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore.
The only danger is that if AMD is depriving themselves of a significant revenue stream, then that makes Nvidia the richer company, possibly allowing it to hire the best programmers, built better facilities, do more R&D, and eventually kill AMD, in which case we're all poorer for AMD's customer-centric move.
Now, I don't think the revenues in this situation are are actually significant enough to matter, but if I'm wrong, AMD may have attached an anvil to its future success. The ability to price discriminate by market segment is critical to the survival of a *lot* of businesses.
In the end, I will not buy a scumbag's product.
Is if fair for a brick-maker to forbid you from using one for a doorstop?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
That's possible. That might also have been the reason for Sony to eliminate the PS3 'Other OS' function. Too many cheap and powerful devices were being clustered together in third world countries and used for who-knows-what. The US Gov't contacts them (or Nvidia) and threatens unmentionable retribution unless they keep these out of the hands of Iran, the Norks or whoever.
Have gnu, will travel.
There's a fucker born every minute.
No company anywhere can dictate what you do with their product once it is in your hands... period. All the EULAs and other 'agreements' companies have concocted over time to try and prevent people from reverse engineering, repairing, or using the product however they see fit have absolutely no basis in law.
With few exceptions, once it's in your hands, you can do what you wish.
Capitalism is funny that way.
AMD and Intel make parallel computing hardware add-ons as well, plus a bunch of little guys. Lesson to be drawn: don't code your stuff in CUDA, use OpenCL so that it is portable to other hardware in case any one vendor gets to big for his britches.
The Tesla's have better and more double precision cores, larger ECC memory and ECC caches, thermally optimized for having 4 of them in 1U servers vs a single card in a desktop.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There are glassware agreements for bars and try off-roading your hatchback and get warranties honored.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The selling point for most professional grade GPUs, aside from certification to run well with specific software packages, is the speed at which they can do full precision floating point operations. The problem for NVidia is that more and more machine learning algorithms are being tuned for lower precision, with even 8-bit operations giving estimates that vastly reduce the number or higher precision operations required. Expect to see cloud providers start offering tiered GPU compute availability, with the lowest tiers including basic machine learning support at little to no additional cost compared to CPU-only VMs, and professional grade GPUs will be overkill for such deployments.
Any company that tries to dictate what you can do with a piece of hardware after you paid for it and own it needs to be taught a lesson.
This is outrageous. Boycott Nvidia products until this changes. Ensure all your associates including purchasing managers are made aware of this boycott.
Unbelievable. The clown ultimately responsible for adding the language should be fired, shunned and shamed publicly for the piece of garbage he or she is.
Fuck nvidia!! Boycott them and buy AMD!!
Companies don't and shouldn't have dictatorial powers over things they have sold.
Software isn't sold. It is licensed.
RMS was right. Again.
Apple's license famously has a 'cannot be used to design weapons' clause.
Good-bye
If you sell $5 buckets for carrying water and *the same* buckets for $50 with a couple of minor tweaks for carrying wine, donâ(TM)t be surprised when people buy the $5 buckets and decide they theyâ(TM)re good enough to carry wine.
This points to either an artificial cross-market restriction (i.e. antitrust) or a wide open opportunity for competition. CUDA and CuDNN represents a substantial hurdle, though. Still, OpenCL *is* in early stages in some deep learning libraries. Hereâ(TM)s hoping it gets to parity (or close enough) to stop these sorts of abuses.
Think again mate. Just ordered four new login servers for an HPC and they all have nVidia graphics cards in them for remote visualization of results using VirtualGL. They will be in a datacentre becuase where the hell else to you but a few thousand cores? Much easier than downloading say a couple hundred GB or even a TB of data to see your results, when there is a spiffy login node with oodles of RAM and much better graphics card than on your desktop. Our users really like this so much we are ditching the separate login and visualization nodes and just making all the login nodes visualization nodes. Perhaps before opening your mouth next time you might want to check with someone with actual experience of actual data centres, rather than your notions of what a data centre should be. Oh and workstations in data centres is really big in the city too, but what would you know.
USAmericans dont own ANYTHING anymore. Wise up. Your are the corporation's bitch and they'll do whatever they want. Ha ha! Your guns totally keep you free.
Define datacenter. My server room in my basement? My server room in my corporation? My server building at my hosting company? All of them have some form of local on-site office with people and workstations.
This is probably the biggest crock of shit since I don't know when. Sheer lunacy.
You sound real free with that meaty corporate dick on your mouth. So brave too I bet your wife is real proud!
A group of managers surrounded by yes-men/women convinced themselves that an obviously ridiculous thing would fly, or can be even be explained away as being for customers' own benefit. Plenty of engineers said "that's retarded" on internal mailing lists. Nobody listened to them and a company lawyer told them to drop the thread. Expect some weeks of denial and PR attempts followed by inevitable caving in with "it's only a guideline". I have not seen this particular train wreck from inside, but they are all the same.
Why does catching herpes mean they have to throw their computer away?
You just won't get any support for them.
Its apple, that is more a friendly warning into one of their many limitations :-)
Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book
Embrace, extend, and extinguish "... a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors."
Microsoft no longer sells a usable operating system. Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made.
Windows 10 shows you ads while you are trying to work. But, at least at present, you may be able to stop at least some of the advertising: 7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you, and how to stop them.
Unless NVidiay make hardware specs available so that other vendors can make software for the card, I think you would have a very strong argument that their software is an intrinsic part of the hardware and should be able to be subject to the same rules as use of the hardware is, since the hardware can not work without it.
Otherwise you could also say that the microcode on any general purpose CPU of any kind is also likewise licensed and able to be restricted in the same way.
If GM can't prevent you buying a car and using it anywhere because of a software license on the microcode of the car's engine control unit, then NVidia should likewise not be allowed to restrict use of their cards in this way, based on a software license for software that is a necessary part of the card's use, for which there is no alternative. Wish I was a lawyer.
NOTE: I despise Nvidia due to past personal experiences dealing with them and won't have an Nvidia product in my house. BUT, this seems aimed at liability though I think they would be better of simply stating it isn't supported rather than implementing it in software, the reality is gaming cards are not designed for running in data centre scenarios, this reveals a lot of bugs and problems that just don't exist when using them for gaming and rather than be on the hook for fixing those problems the easiest solution is to say this product is not made for that scenario. That $5 bucket they sold you might work ok for water but it leaks has cracks in it and the handle is likely to fall off if you fill it to the top and carry for too long, doesn't really matter for water, but when it is your vintage wine the owners are going to start screaming when thousands of dollars just went down the gurgler.
If you OWN the hardware you purchase, you're technically free to do what it as you wish
Indeed, but to do so you will need to write your own driver. The license restrictions has nothing at all to do with your hardware.
Apple's license famously has a 'cannot be used to design weapons' clause.
Oh really?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I won't sell my customers this crap. I ran into a snag with an HP all-in-one laser printer this past week in fact. I didn't realize it at first. The printer was dependent on a non-free plug-in component and because HP had traditionally done a great job of documenting what models were and weren't dependent on non-free pieces I has assumed the printer was free software friendly. Unfortunately HP's documentation was wrong and after spending a few *DAYS* trying to get it working (due to more crappy documentation on installing the drivers on older releases of Redhat Enterprise Linux) and finally getting it "working" I realized the printer was dependent on a proprietary plug-in and entirely unreliable. Never f'ing again. I sell a lot of HP printers- but never again will I trust HP's documentation and I absolutely will not sell another one of these all-in-one laser printers. I will remove an entire product category rather than sell my customers crap that depends on proprietary software. And in the end my customer thinks we're incompetent now and its soured a very good relationship. How am I suppose to explain to my customer that it was because of shitty proprietary software and not our fault? To be honest I've NEVER had this type of situation before because we have NEVER before accidentally sold a customer a model with this crappy proprietary software. So -Fuck you NVIDIA. Not only do you sell crap. You also take advantage of customers in all sorts of other ways beyond the standard fuck you.
The first thing that jumps into my mind is rows and rows of rackmounted servers - hosting either databases, websites, or virtual machines. And the rackmounted chassis that I have looked at (admittedly on the old side) don't have a power supply capable of supplying the juice required for many of the modern GTX video cards, and it isn't obvious to me that the fans in the case are capable of removing all of the heat that these types of video cards generate.
That isn't to say that it can't be done of course - there are ways to satisfy the power requirements for people who really want to go down this road. Getting the heat removed could be a different matter however.
The blockchain exception is an odd one - what difference does that really make what type of work they are doing?
Could be they can't keep up with the warranty of large amounts of cards that are used all the time.
For instance I purchased an electric tool for my work. It says don't use more than 20 hours a week. I use it a bit more than that sometimes. For the pro model you get a discount if you call and complain about the quality of the home tool.
Or security issue.
HPC with Windows login servers?
His wife's was a Japanese sex slave. Bill travelled to Japan for work and paid her for her services. He liked the sex so much, he immediately paid the brothel $1000, bought her out of her sex slave contract. He then sent her parents 2 goats and a pack of double mint gum.
Bill was later quoted as saying "money well spent, now if I could only get my dick to stop itching and burning when I pee"
Msmash(Top Editor) at The Japan Times reports.
I don't know how AMD structures their EULAs, but they also have a line of professional cards, distinct from their consumer cards (and more expensive).
Matrox used to be the good one for this. They didn't make that distinction and as a result the Parhelia retained a lot of its value for a long time, despite the fact that it was never that impressive a card in the first place.
Will be sure to deploy them in all my newly-branded computecenters
Wait until we get to cashless societies. Banks will start changing terms and conditions on a regular basis and sieze your (their) money if they feel you've breached some obscure thing. And there won't be a thing you can do about it.
If Nvidia stands their ground on this then it's not too hard to image some of the affected companies wrapping their own drivers or even jumping on the nouveau project despite Nvidia.
I've 50 PCs in my room. Is it a data center? I'm very confuse. I think that it is a laboratory of PCs.
Back when voodoo was still a thing... I had a nice nvidia card with tv out!
One day i get a new game. Oh. Game doesn't work. Game says update video drivers to the new version. Ok!
Update the driver. tv out is now black and white... (color until the driver loads!)
Contacting nvidia i'm told the solution to my problem is... buy their newest card!
tv out isn't officially supported on my card i bought even tho it has that port and i bought it because it had that port.
So i do the driver shuffle for awhile. new drivers to play games. older driver to make my fucking tv output work.
And i never bought nvidia ever again.
NVIDIA's partner vendors really hate NVIDIA over this. For the past 18 months they have been trying to force partners who provide systems for machine learning and general compute to not even mention GeForce. The thing is everyone knows that GeForce cards are nearly as reliable as Tesla and provide the same performance. A 1080Ti for $700 is only about 10-20% slower than a Tesla V100 at ~$8000. (and that's comparing Pascal to Volta!) This is for real machine learning workloads. This is not a secret. Also, reliability of 9xx and 10xx series GeForce cards is excellent (know from thousands of cards deployed ... can't say more)
This whole thing is just NVIDIA being greedy and evil. They have a monopoly on GPU compute because of the (excellent) CUDA development ecosystem. It's a shame that the open source community has built all of their machine learning frameworks around proprietary software. [as always RMS was right!] There is some hope with the AMD ROCm stuff but it's going to take a big open source community effort to get any of that working well.
I really hate this because I'm forced to go along with NVIDIA for practical reasons but I feel real dirty
It is not aimed at liability. If it was, they would not have explicitly said it was ok to use the cheaper cards for blockchain calculation (crypto currency mining) in datacenters. This is strictly about trying to force companies, universities, and government to pay a premium price for the workstation GPUs that perform only marginally better than the much more cost effective consumer GPUs.
seems like they are all dodgy as
Most likely datacenters already have thousands of consumer grade cards installed.
The ban only applies to the nVidia software that runs the hardware, and not to their hardware itself. Hardware is protected by the first sale doctrine (in the US at least) so nVidia can't control that. So people are free to write their own software to run nVidia GPUs in the data centre. Of course nVidia doesn't make doing that easy. The legal issues around that are similar to those addressed by "right to repair" legislation in other industries.
They will know you are using it in a datacenter when you sue them for damages.
As someone mentioned above, this can serve as a protection mechanism against people suing them after their GPU caused problems in a datacenter.
Actually, it'd be like GM saying you couldn't use the software in your car's engine control unit if you wanted to drive on grass. But hey, you're free to write your own code instead! People are (or at least should be) entitled to the use of the software required to make purchased complex hardware work; drivers should be considered an integral part of the hardware. Your GPU is a very costly brick without the software that makes it function. This is like net neutrality but for hardware you paid for. The FTC can fix this though.
No NVidia Licensing issues anyway, and AMD since opening up its drivers are more reliable now on all platforms as many more engineers are working on drivers in the OpenGL area than Nividia is on Direct X.
One example is games and I found worked surprising well with WINE now, and I was able to dump my Windows Guest with VFIO to run FAF.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
An action like this is enough to prevent me from ever considering building another project atop CUDA. It's not that I plan on rolling out consumer grade hardware into the datacenter. It's the principal that they can suddenly and arbitrarily lock customers into terms they didn't agree to when they set out and committed to a platform. Fuck Nvidia. Seriously. Fuck them.
AMD is an awesome alternative, as long as you don't mind you stuff not working correctly (especially opengl) and crashing all the time, not to mention the complete abandonment of all Linux support. Their API works like crap (sorry, that's too polite: It's SHIT, complete SHIT).
Seriously. As a graphics developer I have tried AMD many times (many, many, times, in fact, since 1998) over the years and they are always shit. And by that I mean complete SHIT, that I would never use on a personal system. The one and only time AMD was decent was for mining cryptocurrency in 2013. That's it... Literally. Because that didn't require any real graphics drivers whatsoever per se, it was just standard opencl code that worked around the dumbass driver errors. The hardware was good, better than nvidia back then.
Their hardware is actually decent, meanwhile their software developers continue to be absolute morons. With the resources they have, I don't understand why AMD hasn't wiped and rebooted their whole software stack with new people. It seems like there is probably some one old top-level AMD hardware guy that has been there since 1968 and thinks he and his team can write software. Seriously, fire that guy and start over you morons! I'm not kidding, fire the entire software/driver group and hire all new people. Don't even let the new people look at the old code, Start from scratch.
I used to work for the company making the EasyViz dicom/mint medical image reader used by many hospitals and image reading facilities, and apart from the workstation edition (everything in a desktop application) it requires "rendernodes" placed in a datacenter from where the images are streamed to a thin client. All these rendernodes are equipped with high-end consumer NVidia cards. EasyViz can use any NVidia card but absolutely everybody uses a consumer version due to cost.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Just put a sign saying "Gaming Room (totally not a Datacenter)" on your datacenter room's door.
How much does nVidia pay for such a post?
I heard that if you put a thin slice of a large onion in your dvd drive, it prevents your computer from getting a virus. Posies don't work for computer viruses.
Unless there is an undisclosed Pentium-style floating point bug... Damn, they are using "Pentium" for other crap now. I miss the days when I didn't need to read a dozen product specification sheets to compare CPUs.
The jellyfish in Congress roll get their belly tickles by megacorps who feed them millions to make billions so they the laws to do it. I say in the immortal words of Linus Torvald, "FUCK NVIDIA!".
Consoles don't use nvidia. Apple doesn't use nvidia. About the only place where nvidia is used is discrete graphics and vendor-locked-in suckers using CUDA like it was Internet Explorer 6.
It is always a risk to use closed standards over open ones.
Maybe they found a compute error inconsumer silicon they don't want to acknowledge publicly, but after seeing the shit storm headed Intel's way, didn't want to wear the liability.
Car example:
I buy a car and CompanyX says I can't use it to transport bread. I still do and then suddenly they have a recall. They say I should sign that I can't transport bread or they won't install the system that could prevent me from dying in an accident.
And remember, just because you click OK at the AUP does not mean it is legal what they wrote. At least not in any normal country.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I thought that most miners ran a custom firmware to get better performance? Wouldn't that make this mute?
As a diehard nvidia fan, next card/laptop will be AMD. Fuck'em.
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene, you need a good motherboard that allows for multiple GPUs: ASRock H110 Pro BTC+, ASUS B250, Biostar TB350-BTC, and GIGABYTE GA-H110-D3A.
In academia, that would also lead to the effect that new developers are more often trained on OpenCL and less on CUDA. That could lead to the sort of long-term win Microsoft Visual Studio had over the Borland development tools.
What's Borland? For that matter, what's CUDA? Cud a' used OpenCL?
F*uk them!
$5 for each "shit", $10 for a "SHIT", $10 for a vague reference about being a "graphics developer", and an extra $20 if posted by something other than Anonymous Coward. I guess selling your soul does have a price, but that $20 just couldn't get him there.
Basically they are are underclocked geforce cards.
No they aren't, they run at the same speed as a GeForce.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Sounds like there's a business opportunity there:
"I might be able to salvage the case and maybe the power supply. Twenty bucks and a case of Bud? Sure, of course I can collect".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just got to catch these guys before the garbage gets hauled off. My brother had a nice Voodoo back when Voodoo was a thing. Sold it as a used high end card to a prospective buyer. Dude threw the machine away and came in the shop wanting to buy another.